The case adds to a widening pattern of federal courts checking aggressive crowd-control tactics deployed at immigration enforcement sites as demonstrations have spread across the country under the Trump administration’s enforcement surge.
PORTLAND, Ore. — U.S. District Judge Amy Baggio on Friday restricted federal agents from deploying chemical munitions in quantities likely to reach Gray’s Landing, an affordable housing complex adjacent to Portland’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, after the complex’s property manager and tenants sued the federal government over months of involuntary tear-gas exposure during protests at the building.
Baggio’s preliminary injunction allows agents to use chemical munitions near the complex only when necessary to respond to an imminent threat to life.
“The Court recognizes a preliminary injunction is an extraordinary remedy, but this is an extraordinary case,” Baggio wrote in her opinion.
The ruling is the second time a federal judge in Oregon has imposed limits on tear-gas use at the Portland ICE facility. A separate federal court, in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Oregon on behalf of protesters and freelance journalists, had previously issued a temporary restraining order restricting agents’ use of tear gas at the building and is also considering whether to grant a preliminary injunction in that case.
Who lives at Gray’s Landing
Gray’s Landing sits catty-corner from the ICE facility. The affordable housing complex has 237 residents; nearly a third are age 63 or older, according to court filings. Twenty percent of units are reserved for low-income veterans and 16 percent of tenants identify as disabled.
At a hearing last month, residents described physical and psychological effects they attributed to repeated exposure, including difficulty breathing, coughing, burning eyes, hives, anxiety and panic attacks. Some testified about wearing gas masks inside their own apartments.
Baggio wrote in her opinion that the case was not about protesters’ rights. It concerned, she said, residents’ allegations that federal officers’ use of chemical munitions “has been so excessive — so enveloping — that it violates Plaintiffs’ rights.”
How the lawsuit developed
The property manager and several tenants filed the lawsuit in December, naming ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and their respective heads as defendants. They argued the repeated use of chemical munitions had violated residents’ rights to life, liberty and property by sickening them, contaminating their apartments and confining them inside.
Plaintiffs filed an updated request for a preliminary injunction in late January after agents launched gas at a crowd that local officials described as peaceful, including young children.
“This decision protects basic health and safety and the right to live in one’s home without fear of chemical weapons being used by the government,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a legal nonprofit representing the plaintiffs, said Friday. “Residents should not be harmed simply because they live next to a site of public protest.”
ICE and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling.
Government’s position
The defendants said in court filings that federal officers have deployed crowd-control devices in response to protests they described as “violent, obstructive or trespassing” or noncompliant with dispersal orders. The government also argued that under the plaintiffs’ theory, “federal and state law enforcement officers would violate the Constitution whenever they deploy airborne crowd-control devices that inadvertently drift into someone’s home or business, even if the use of such devices is otherwise entirely lawful.”
The preliminary injunction will remain in effect as the lawsuit proceeds.